> I have done some really elegant stuff that made me super productive but looking at the code base three years later I myself can barely figure out how it works

> I have done some really elegant stuff that made me super productive but looking at the code base three years later I myself can barely figure out how it works or how to make changes. Could well apply to me and some of my old C++ projects. Well, except for the super-productive part. PG would say that it's not that the abstractions afforded by metaprogramming are incomprehensible. It's just that, if you are a habitual Blub programmer, everything up the power curve from you is always going to appear weird and hairy. This sort of argument is a terrible one to have with generalizations, though. You should look at specific cases where metaprogramming has been used and analyze them on a case-by-case basis. Sure, a bad, leaky, poorly-documented abstraction is going to lead to grief. On the other hand, umpteen thousands of programmers use the metamagic of Rails on a daily basis and barely bat an eyelash. (Or so it seems to me.)